Introducing Darwin

A Graphic Guide

Jonathan Miller, Borin Van Loon

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781848319707
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: Biological Sciences

Progress in genetics today would not be possible without Darwin's revolution, but the mysterious man who laid the rational basis for undermining belief in God's creation was remarkable timid. He spent most of his life in seclusion; a semi-invalid, riddled with doubts, fearing the controversy his theories might unleash.In this brilliantly lucid book - a classic originally published in 1982 - Jonathan Miller unravels Darwin's life and his contribution to biology, and traces the path from his scientific predecessors to the later modifications that his own evolutionary theories required.Introducing Darwin brings alive the difficult progress from pre-Darwinian thinking to modern genetics and the devastatingly important impact of one man on our fundamental understanding of biology, life and ourselves.

WHEN DARWIN’S FRIEND & COLLEAGUE T.H. HUXLEY FIRST READ THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES IN 1859 HE SAID TO HIMSELF ……
… “ HOW STUPID NOT TO HAVE THOUGHT OF IT BEFORE!”

THIS DOESN’T MEAN HE THOUGHT THE BOOK WAS TRIVIAL
ON THE CONTRARTY…
HRRMPH!

In fact The Origin of Species was a popular success. The first printing sold out on the day of publication. This alone distinguished it from most other great theories in the history of science. Isaac Newton’s great work was, and still is, inaccessible to the general reader. The mathematical argument is so abstruse that it took many years of patient analysis before the scientific community fully understood its implications. The fact that Darwin’s theory could be put so simply may have been one of the reasons Huxley asked himself why nobody had thought of it before.

WHA-?

This impression was reinforced by darwin’s own personality. He seemed little more than an affable amateur, some one whose formal education had been a series of humilating disasters.

None of this discredits darwin’s achievement. But it does reveal something rather peculiar about it.

HERE’S A THEORY WHICH CAN BE CONCEIVED AND CONVEYED IN EVERYDAY LANGUAGE BY SOMEONE – BY HIS OWN ADMISSION – POORLY QUALIFIED . . .
WHY HAD NO ONE THOUGHT OF IT BEFORE?

In fact, one reason why Darwin issued his book when he did, is that he was panicked into publishing by receiving through the post a summary of the theory which he’d been secretly nursing for twenty years.

By 1859, the scientific atmosphere was saturated with the possibility of evolution. It was only a matter of time before someone stumbled on the truth. Nevertheless the question remains: why hadn’t it been recognized before?

One answer might be that the necessary facts weren’t available until Darwin discovered them, and that he was lucky to find the missing pieces which allowed him to make sense of all the rest. But this isn’t true either, for although Darwin made many important observations of his own, the facts which would have supported his theory were already known and had been widely discussed before. No one it seems had recognized their significance. Or not entirely.

WHY NOT? WHY DIDN’T THEY ‘SEE’ WHAT DARWIN SAW? WHEN A SCIENTIST RECOGNIZES A SIGNIFICANT NEW PATTERN WITHOUT ANY NEW FEATURES HAVING BEEN ADDED TO IT, THE PROCESS MUST BE SIMILAR TO WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A ‘PUZZLE’ PICTURE SUDDENLY CHANGES APPEARANCE…
THE PATTERN OF THESE LINES MAY LOOK LIKE THE PROFILE OF A BEAUTIFUL YOUNG WOMAN…
BUT IF YOU LOOK AT IT IN ANOTHER WAY YOU MAY SUDDENLY SEE AN UGLY GYPSY
‘SEEING’ ME AS A RABBIT…
… PREVENTS YOU FROM SEEING ME AS A DUCK FACING IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION
THE PATTERN OF LINES IN A ‘NECKER CUBE’ LOOKS LIKE THE CORNER OF A ROOM. BUT IT CAN AS EASILY BECOME THE OUTER EDGE OF A SOLID CUBE.

The point is that a strong preconception about what a pattern means, what it represents, can stop you seeing it in any other way. Presumably this happened to Darwin’s predecessors and some of his contemporaries as well. They failed to ‘see’ what Darwin ‘saw’, not because they were short of facts, but because they had reasons for ‘seeing’ the facts in a different way. They saw a duck and Darwin taught them to recognize a rabbit. Huxley’s surprise was recognizing something that had been in front of his eyes all along.

The question is, what preconceptions led scientists to overlook the pattern that Darwin eventually saw? (Another question you will have to ask is whether Darwin really saw what he claimed to have seen, and whether his own position was quite as revolutionary as it has been said to be.)

There were several preconceptions which delayed the recognition of evolution in nature. And they arose from man’s tendency to project the image of his own mind onto the world around him.
1. The biblical notion of special creation.
2. The Greek philosophical notion of Ideal Forms.

Creationism

MOST SOCIETIES EXPLAIN THE ORIGIN OF THE LIVING WORD AS AN ACT OF PROVIDENTIAL DESIGN. FOR WESTERN EUROPE, THIS DOCTRINE IS ENSHRINED IN THE BIBLE

According to the Book of Genesis God formed the world and stocked it with a wealth of clearly distinguishable living forms. Christian theologians extracted several important dogmas from this myth.

The Relative Youth of the Earth

CHRISTIAN WRITERS ARGUED WITH ONE ANOTHER ABOUT THE EXACT DATE OF THE CREATION. BUT THEY ALL AGREED IT WAS A COMPARATIVELY RECENT EVENT…
TIME WE MAY COMPREHEND, ‘TIS BUT 5 DAYS ELDER THAN OURSELVES & HATH THE SAME HOROSCOPE WITH THE WORLD.
THE UNIVERSE IS 6000 YEARS OLD-THAT’S MY RULING!

For Christians, physical history was a short action-packed chapter bracketed between endless tracts of eternity. Such a short time-span ruled out the possibility of gradual change. Until scientists recognized that the age of the earth had to be reckoned in billions of years, evolutionary thought had no chance of gaining a foothold. This consideration will return to plague Darwin in his later years.

The Permanence of the Earth’s Physical Structure

According to orthodox Christian thought, the appearance of the modern earth was the result of two factors: 1. The shape God had given it in the beginning. 2. The damage he inflicted on it when he punished man with the flood. The globe was a static ruin, and hadn’t changed its basic structure since the deluge ploughed up the mountains and excavated the valleys. In a scene of such changeless monotony there was no need for living things to alter.

The Permanence of Living Things

Once Adam had named all the plants and animals these inaugural forms bred true to type and never changed their identity.

WHEN GOD INUNDATED THE WORLD HE ORDERED NOAH TO SET ASIDE A REPRESENTATIVE PAIR OF EVERY LIVING TYPE, SO THAT AFTER THE FLOOD, THE WORLD WOULD BE REPOPULATED EXACTLY AS BEFORE.

For pious Christians it was an article of faith that the living world was an unaltered replica of the one which God had cre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Creationism
• Further Reading
• Index